Posted by sarahZedig yesterday
Well well well, look who decided to finally show up!
Hi folks. It’s me, Sarah Zedig. You might remember me from when you are giving me money right now, even though I haven’t posted anything new in months. You are my heroes. Between the “AI” astroturf, rampant inflation, innumerable layoffs, mass transphobia campaign, and the unchecked rise of fascist griftopia, 2026 has been an all-time stinker of a year. And it’s only halfway over! It’s rough out there. I don’t know anyone who isn’t stressed about money. My partner and I have had to cut back on a ton of expenses, including some of the support we used to give to other creators/friends when possible. So the fact that so many of y’all are still helping me pay my bills despite getting basically nothing in return really, really, really means a lot to me. I know how lucky I am to be in this position, and I don’t take it for granted.
So what have I been up to these last six months? The answer is long, complicated, often deeply upsetting, and is the subject of today’s lengthy update. The short answer is: A Fucking Lot, and also Not Very Much. I’ve been drafting this post since the middle of June but Events and Circumstances just kept happening, each one shifting my perspective on the year and the future of my work in ways I felt needed to be addressed. I also didn’t want to come to you empty-handed after such a long absence, especially given the arguable starting point of this saga and the thing I’ve been terrified to announce publicly, which we’ll get into in just a moment. For now what I’ll say is that I’ve been cooking up a new video series, a stripped down back-to-basics critical exercise that’ll produce shorter works released much more frequently. My intention since July has been to blow the fucking doors off my silence with the “pilot” for this series, but alas aforementioned Events and Circumstances kept pushing my schedule back.
I’m extremely happy to say that is no longer the case. I’ve got all my equipment set up, and I have the entire weekend to myself to get the “pilot” finished and ready to share. As soon as this post goes up, I’m shutting my computer down and going straight to filming. Its project is designed for a quick turnaround and I’m treating the “pilot” as a proof of concept that helps me figure out how I want these videos to look and feel in the long term, rather than being the Full Finished Vision as such. Which is just to say, I make no promises but I’ll be fucking pissed at myself if it takes more than a week to share with you.
Now you might be asking, if that’s really the case then why not wait a bit to update us when you do have that “pilot” ready? I’m certainly tempted to do exactly that. But this post is already bursting at the seams in wordcount and full of strong, complicated emotions that will overshadow anything else I try to do here. If the new thing is, as I hope it will be, the beginning of a new era for my channel, then it deserves to come into this world without all the baggage of the old era weighing it down. As such, I won’t be sharing any more details about what the show is or how it works until I’ve got more than just words to show for myself.
There’s another reason I’m posting now, though, which I think is a perfect bridge into the meat of this update. Today, August 7th at time of writing, is the first day in months when I have felt genuine, plausible hope-- with extreme emphasis on plausible! I’m a naturally optimistic person even as I’m deeply cynical about many things, I take seriously Mariame Kaba’s contention that “hope is a discipline” and try very hard to not let feelings of Doom steamroll me out of commission even when there is very good reason to feel doomed. But y’all, it’s been hard lately. Everyone I know is struggling financially, all the worst people in the world are in charge, and trans rights are under attack everywhere you look. In our apartment building, which is supposed to be subsidized low-income housing, the recently-appointed property management company has been engaged in a campaign of astonishing tomfoolery whose specifics I’ll touch on a bit later. I’ve been in a state of near-constant panic for over a month, and cried hysterics every single day of the last two weeks. Which isn’t to say there have been no bright spots-- in fact, a big chunk of why I’ve been so demoralized is that there’ve been many bright spots, little victories and personal milestones that were profoundly affirming, but each and every one was immediately snuffed out by some new horrible Event and/or Circumstance. Lately, it’s felt like good things only lead to punishment. It’s hard to do good work or be hopeful about the future in an environment like that.
But yesterday something happened that finally broke a sizeable hole in those dark clouds. None of our problems have, strictly speaking, been solved, but we no longer feel totally isolated and powerless in our situation. Tagging along behind that sense of renewed, plausible hope was a dearly-needed clarity about my art, my career, and the future I want to work towards. It feels like I woke up having crossed an invisible threshold, and now suddenly all the difficult questions I’ve been asking myself this year seem a lot less intimidating.
That’s the subject of today’s update: Recollections of a process of critical self-reflection, carried out through one of the most stressful periods in my life so far. Given the nature of the material, I want to give a broad content warning for discussions of death, sickness, poverty, housing insecurity, and managerial harassment. There’s not a ton of it, but it’s there. And hey, for once the story has a relatively happy ending!
So with all the preamble done, let’s get into it.
I. The Last Straw.
You may remember some months back when I excitedly announced getting an editor to finish the 2025 Ghostwatch vlog compilations and help with future videos. Well, wouldn’t you know it, right as we were starting to build up some momentum, their computer blew up. At the exact moment when every major computer component, even on the secondhand market, more than quadrupled in price. So we’re sort of stuck until they can build up enough savings for a new PC, and since the job market is like 90% fictitious it’s really anyone’s guess when that time will come.
Maybe I could find another editor. But it took me several years to even admit that I needed an editor in the first place, and it took finding the right person at the right moment for me to finally take a chance. I didn’t expect it to go without a hitch. Neither of us have done post-production collaboration like this before, which is why I brought them on for a low-stakes project like Ghostwatch first. Of course I expected bumps along the way, I was even looking forward to dealing with them because I enjoy learning new things, but I didn’t expect the car to just fucking die before we even got off the frontage road. And it was the strength of this editor’s work, our rapport in private conversations that convinced me to bring them on.
I was already feeling demoralized and rudderless, so when I got the news about their computer it hit on a very primal level. Bringing on an editor was meant to be the first step in a process of making video work fun for me again, and instead it became just the latest tripped-and-fell-at-the-starting-line Event in my professional life. There’s a lot I could have done. Ask an editor friend to help me out. Lock in and do the work myself. These things happen, after all, and as a working artist you have to be able to roll with the punches and carry forward anyway. But for how long? How many times can you endure projects blowing up in your face, often for reasons totally outside of your control, before it starts to feel personal? At what point do you take a step back and finally admit that something fundamental to your approach just plain isn’t working?
So, around March or April of this year, I formally gave up on video essays.
II. I am formally giving up on video essays.
Sorry, did I bury the lede on that one? Yeah, my bad. You can understand why I might be hesitant to bring it up, what with video essays nominally being The Thing You Pay Me To Do and all that. But it’s true. I quit. Do I really even need to explain why? You can’t throw a stone online without hitting someone complaining about how much it sucks trying to survive in the modern ~Creator Economy~. May Leitz has talked about it, Ian Danskin has talked about it, small creators like Filmotter have talked about it, and those are just the most recent examples I can think of. “AI” slop, market saturation, overreliance on formula, algorithms, corporate censorship, copyright trolls, plagiarism, take your pick. The vibes are just plain bad in video essay land, and I don’t see them getting better any time soon.
I didn’t make a public Thing of my videological retirement at the time because... well, frankly, given my track record with prematurely announcing stuff in the past, I was genuinely afraid that by jumping the gun I’d somehow find a way to fuck this up too. On the flip side, I didn’t want to deliver my resignation without first having a good sense of what I wanted to do next. After all, quitting video essays doesn’t mean I’m quitting art, or even necessarily YouTube. I just needed some time by myself to find my own antidotes first, take a long hard look at my problems from a great distance, play around without expectation or purpose, and derive once more a meaning to keep me swimming against the madness. It’s something I’ve thought about doing for many years but always decided against out of fear that it would destroy what remains of my audience and leave me even worse off than before. But I understand now that the choice before me is between a slow bleed untreated and invasive surgical intervention. I might be able to endure the former, but I can’t survive without the latter.
III. Real people in real places.
A big contributing factor to my schism with the video essay, and something I’ve written about plenty of times in the past, is how isolating the job is. I like working with other creatives. I like getting criticism from my peers. Other creators claim to have those things in abundance in their communities, but that hasn’t been my experience with youtube in the least.
To fix my heart, I needed to find real people in the real world to work with, on projects that were not my own. So I volunteered to gaff an all-trans short film. For those who don’t know, a gaffer is the person on set who translates the artistic vision of the director/DOP into an actionable set of tools and steps for the grip/electric department to implement. “I want the scene to look like this” becomes “I want a diffuse key light above eye level here, a harsh shadow here but NOT there or there, and a black flag for negative fill when talent lands on their 2.” Of course on this particular production I was the entire G&E department, so I was basically delegating tasks to myself. Anyway, this was to be my first time working on a movie set in almost ten years, and to say I was nervous is a wild understatement. I loved film work more than I can express, but I quit because the toll on my body and time left no energy for finishing college or working on videos. Now I’m older, heavier, paying for years of abusive service jobs and always pushing myself to Be A Good Worker, weakened by long COVID, and just generally out of practice. I convinced myself that all my skills had atrophied and I was gonna make an ass of myself in front of a bunch of energetic twentysomethings fresh out of film school. I almost missed the first day of shooting because I’d literally worried myself sick.
It went so much better than I possibly could have hoped. The instant I arrived on set, it was like no time had passed at all. God, I missed it. I knew I missed it, but this much? Despite having only met the crew briefly in one pre-production meeting, we got along famously and already by day two everyone was saying how impressed they were with my problem-solving abilities. Is that bragging? Why do I feel like it’s pompous shithead behavior to say “they were impressed with [me]”? But it’s true. I’m good at my job, and I always have been. It’s maybe the only job I’ve ever had that came so naturally while also providing an unfathomable depth of new things to learn and new challenges to solve. It’d been so long, I forgot that I have this spooky knack for knowing what directors want before they even ask for it, so by the time they turn around to ask “would it be possible to get an extra highlight” I’ve already got it set up and ready to strike. Competence feels good, man. Sometimes being good at your job fucking rules.
What really surprised me was how often folks came to me with questions. I was the oldest person on set, and to my surprise the one with the most professional film experience by a lot. I don’t know why I was surprised, I knew exactly what level of production I was getting into, but somehow I still thought of myself as the awkward, closeted, head-barely-above-water creature I was when I first started in 2014. Suddenly I found myself in the shoes of my mentor, a film studies professor who also happened to be one of the best gaffers in Oklahoma, whom I worked under many times and who taught me more about the art of making and loving cinema than anyone else I’ve ever known. It felt like returning the favor, somehow. I always wanted to be a professor but was heavily cautioned against it by my professors, and this experience was good enough it almost made me reconsider having taken their advice. I showed curious crewmembers how to wrap cable over/under, explained the basics of three point lighting and contrast ratios, and just generally ran through the peculiarities of how a professional set is run any time it came up. It was an exhausting shoot even though it was only one or two days a week over the course of a month (my skills may not have atrophied but my physical endurance certainly has), but I enjoyed every second of it.
And then, when that production wrapped, one of the camera operators asked me to light their short film, with production happening just a few weeks later in June. The success of the first shoot gave me enough of a confidence boost that I immediately said yes, even though I had some reservations. Part of why I agreed to work on the first one was knowing it’d be shot on cheap late-2000s handycams, meaning the pressure on me to be precise was a lot more minimal than it might otherwise have been. But this second short was planned for a Sony A7S, with an extremely ambitious pitch I genuinely wasn’t sure I could pull off. It required me to be at my ver best, and if I fucked it up it could well take down the entire production.
Luckily, I am in fact good at my job! This turned out to be one of the coolest amateur film experiences I’ve ever had, which was not something I expected to say of my *second* production after being out of the game for so long. An eleven page script shot in a single take, with an array of eight LED lights whose color/brightness I changed in real time over the course of the scene. Lights I’d never worked with before, utilizing technology that literally did not exist the last time I was on a set, and from conception to implementation I did it entirely by myself. None of us thought we were gonna pull it off, and even structured the production around the expectation that we wouldn’t. But we did. And it was awesome. You will almost certainly never see the fruits of that labor unless you catch it at the Seattle Trans Underground Film Fest this October or the director otherwise decides to make it public somewhere, but that’s how it is with short films. I’m really happy with the work I did, and that’s what matters.
Doing those two gigs back to back proved massively invigorating. I made a bunch of new friends and connections in the city, I got the validation of being reminded that I am in fact very good at lighting, and best of all it had me wanting to make films of my own again. I forgot how much I loved being on set, the collaborative atmosphere, the annoying grind of it all. All the joyful ways film workers end up talking about movies in between takes, the silent comradery that builds up when the crew is warmed up and locked in on the same frequency. The fun of coming up with solutions to odd problems on the fly. Messy people trying their best not to make a messy film. Most profound of all was how energizing it was to build this environment with an entirely transgender cast and crew. When Juniper Blessing was tragically murdered at UW earlier this year, it was through these folks that I found out about her vigil, and with them that I cried while hearing stories about her life among hundreds of other grieving queer Seattleites. They made me less cynical. They made me even happier to be living in the PNW. They made me want to make art again.
It’s all about people. Real people in real places. I came away from these two productions with significant clarity about my decision to quit video essays. It’s not that I stopped loving film, or stopped wanting to analyze it, or even stopped wanting to make videos as such. It’s that I’d lost touch with the animating force that drove me into this world to begin with, like I arrived to video essays at the endpoint of a journey I never did the work to backfill. For all the times I’ve talked about reinventing myself or my process or my approach to essays in recent years, I think at the core I’ve always been trying to recreate the success I had back in 2019 before the pandemic went and fucked it all up. Everything I’ve done since then has, on some level, been an attempt to get back to where I was. In my heart, consciously or not, I believed it was necessary for me to retrace my steps before I could move forward. Thus I only ever treated the symptom, and so the cause just kept getting worse.
I felt obligated to keep making video essays. I also wanted to, certainly! Some part of me still does! But I made the mistake of letting that want precede a motivation for the wanting. I had the skills, the equipment, the inspiration, the time, the audience... and no real reason to do it anymore besides having loudly called myself “a video essayist” so publicly for so long. I’ve spent years trying to catch up to myself, losing my motivation with cut after bitter cut of failed collaborations, catastrophic drama, eviction, death, poor video performance, hard drive failure, all while feeling my work slip more and more into obscurity. Obscure even to my own eyes. It’s only now that I finally understand-- I was never going to catch up to myself no matter what I did or how hard I tried. I’ve already been there once, after all, and if it’d been a good place to stay then I would have stayed.
The world has changed. The platform has changed. The audience has changed. I’ve changed. Which means the art I want to make has to change too.
IV. If not video essays, what?
So I set videos on the back burner and stopped feeling guilty about putting time into other hobbies. The big one to start with was photography. I’ve been a casual photographer for most of my life, but after a two-week vacation to Ireland to visit my partner in March (paid for with a voucher I got when covid forced Aer Lingus to cancel my flights in 2020) something clicked in a way it never had before. I felt very in command of my gear, better at framing fast, better at finding focus, better at swapping lenses and changing settings and just all around more competent and intentional from moment to moment. Friends went from politely complementing my pictures to saying “hey, this is really good actually.” I learned how to use Resolve’s new photo editor and got serious about reframing, masking, color correction etc, which pushed my best stuff over some kind of line into “I could put these in an art show” territory. So I did! But more on that in a minute.
Another hobby: collage. A few years ago, while dropping a friend off at an Amtrak station, I grabbed a pamphlet for every single bus route in Seattle thinking it’d make for a fun collage project. In June, I finally decided to give it a shot. I cut out every map and timetable and spent hours finding interesting contrasts and modes of expression with the material. Chimeric maps to nowhere and everywhere, arrival times threaded and overlapping and tumbling out of order. I didn’t have any plan for what it was about or how it would look, just intuition and a “fuck it, why not” attitude. This process turned out to be the source of a surprising amount of perspective on how I approach art. Something about the simple, almost mechanical act of cutting out paper shapes, vs the intuitive intellectual process of putting them together in a pleasing way. I was surprised to see the same fundamental steps as every other creative project I’ve worked on succinctly rendered in perfect microcosm. It connected me to my mother, who did a ton of collage work in the years before her death, and to younger versions of myself who were first learning how to write stories or make films. It reminded me how far I’ve come, and how much further I can still go if I just give myself permission to try. It is, hilariously enough, the direct inspiration for the video project I mentioned at the start of this post.
Lastly, there’s piano. This is another one I have a long history with. I played my grandparents’ piano a lot as a kid (much to every nearby adult’s annoyance), and I had a cheap Casio toy keyboard in middle school that I spent many hours torturing. Despite this, I never actually learned how to play. Same story with guitar. Every attempt to traditionally learn either instrument failed spectacularly because I’m not really interested in Making Music. I play because it soothes me. I find it meditative. But I’ve been playing a lot more lately, like A Lot a lot, almost every day, and much like with my camera I feel I’ve stepped over an invisible threshold of mutual understanding and suddenly my piano and me are on the same page. It’s made me better at guitar, too, especially now that I’ve FINALLY through brute fucking force learned how to reliably pull off barre chords at speed.
It’s fucked up how if you practice a thing, you get better at the thing. We hear it all our lives that practice makes perfect, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise. But we also live in a culture that venerates the exceptional talent of youth, that incentivizes creators to never stop long enough to ask questions or think deeply about their process, that demands you release shit as often as possible regardless of quality. Quite honestly, the state of things right now is such that integrity and caution are objectively bad for business. Yeah, sure, practice makes perfect, but “perfect” doesn’t pay nearly as well as “good enough.” Hardly a new dynamic, but worsened significantly by extractive digital tech and the ambient conservatism of our neoliberal culture.
But you do get better with practice, and there’s no age limit. You can start at any time, and I’ve found that progress can happen shockingly fast if you go in with a low-stakes mindset. I’m in my late 30s! I thought it was Over, but it very much was not! The common thread among all these hobbies was that I pursued them for my own sake. I practiced to get better because getting better meant being more articulate, more capable of expressing myself. I’ve come away from these months with a renewed appreciation for the no-nonsense bedrock fundamentals of practicing art. With video essays, I’ve treated the entire production process as a largely solved problem, a sort of annoying inconvenience in between me having an idea and delivering a finished version of that idea to the public. Which is the exact kind of mindset that leads less scrupulous creators to using “AI” instead of putting in the work themselves. And why would they? There’s no benefit to having integrity or work ethic. YouTube embedded the plagiarism machine in its own software! You’re a fucking idiot if you aren’t pumping out soulless slop 24/7, it’s free money with no consequences in sight. And who, really, can afford to turn down free money in this economy?
That’s where I was as we approached the end of June: newly invigorated, driven by purpose, and excited to exhibit the best results of my experiments in the art show.
V. THE ART SHOW.
Some friends and I are all members of a network of artists with access to a shared gallery space, and a while back we decided to put on an adult art show for Pride. This was some of the motivation for me honing my photography, and the entire motivation for me getting into collage. We put together an amazing show filled with a mix of sexually explicit artwork, traditional nudes, and whatever other stuff the local gays wanted to display. A number of people who showed up immediately turned around and left, but the ones who stayed fucking stayed. We had so many great conversations with people who saw what we were doing and understood its importance as a statement against censorship and the ongoing oppression of queer art, especially art depicting queer sex. It was an unambiguous success, the first thing my partner and I have organized to go off without a hitch in years. We were literally in tears by the end of the night because it was the first time a lot of us had ever been in a gallery and we just weren’t used to seeing so many strangers stare at our art for long stretches of time, then come up to talk to us about it as if we were Real Artists and not just Some Fucking Assholes. It was awesome. It was everything I wanted it to be. I was so proud of my partner for organizing and curating it, and of all our friends for bringing their best shit without reserve. This was the point at which I finally thought, “Okay, now I know where I stand with my art, now I’m ready to break the news to my supporters” and started drafting this post.
Several days later, we got an email from management saying that we had to take the entire show down within the hour or else they would remove it themselves, and said we could only speak to them about the judgment the next day. They got a complaint, you see, and felt the art didn’t “meet corporate values” and had to go. Nevermind that plenty of cishets have put on shows featuring adult artwork in that space in the past, nevermind that we put up signs and guarded the doors made clear what kind of show this was. It was too gay, too explicit, too political, too transexual. So, naturally, we all immediately raced to their office and spent two hours in a screaming match as they gave us a guided tour through every transphobic dogwhistle in the books. They fearmongered about children seeing the art, they insisted that other people involved were afraid of us and cowed into silence, they demonstrated fantastic ignorance of the history of provocative sexual art, my partner was repeatedly aggressively misgendered directly to her face, and... well, you probably get the picture.
It was two hours of being talked down to, talked over, dismissed, yelled at, insulted, and accused. It’s one thing to have read the history of queer censorship; it’s another thing entirely to suddenly be right in the middle of it. You always think, when you imagine such situations, you’ll have some kind of powerful rebuke, that you’ll say your peace and feel some kind of Victory. I, at least, did get in a couple of those “ohhhhh I wish you would” type rehearsed rejoinders in-- and it didn’t matter. They ran through every dogwhistle, and when we tried to call them on it they immediately turned to “this is why everyone’s turning against queer people, you’re all so angry and mean.” They had the right wrong answer for everything. Kneejerk reactionary upchuck swallowed whole from a mainstream media run by liars and bigots. I really can’t overstate how astonishing it was to experience the perfect shadow image of the antitrans phantasm rendered with total thoughtlessness and delivered in the same tone of voice you’d use to explain to a child that the earth is round. It was only by sheer obstinance that we got them to relent and let us tear down the show when we originally planned to... the very next day.
That was absolutely a victory on our part, but it didn’t feel like one. The managers of this gallery space also manage our housing. The type of housing we’re in requires a lot of paperwork where we have to sit down face to face with these people for hours as they audit every single penny we’ve made in the last calendar year. That process sucked even in the best of times, but now? How the fuck are we supposed to be civil anymore? We came away exhausted, sad, demoralized, humiliated, ashamed, furious, outraged, you fucking name it and we probably felt it. This was not how we wanted the day to go, or how we wanted the show to be remembered. I was all set to lug my camera out to downtown Seattle for the last World Cup match and try interviewing folks on the street about their feelings on the city. Instead, I spent the rest of my day in bed or on the couch with stomach pains and a killer headache and a rapidly modulating urge to either scream or cry. Before I’d had a chance to internalize how positive and affirming the show was, the whole thing was transformed into a caustic shibboleth that ate away at me from the inside every time I thought about it. Which is just kind of typical, isn’t it? Do you see why I decided to swear the whole video enterprise off? It’s like every time I even think about doing some kind of serious youtube-facing video work, the universe bends over backwards to permanently derail the attempt. It’s not fun feeling like you’re cursed. I wish I had whatever it is you need to push through the adversity and just do the thing anyway, but at least on that day I simply did not.
The good news is that the attempted censorship by management did not succeed and has spectacularly blown up in their faces. A bunch of other artists in this network, many of whom we’ve been trying to contact for ages, came out of the woodwork to defend us... INCLUDING SOMEONE WE KNOW TO BE A TERF!!! People we’ve never talked to have told us that they explicitly want to be part of any future show that we organize. Other galleries have even expressed interest in hosting us! It’s been a good reminder that a handful of people with power are being huge irrational assholes, and a healthy majority of most everyone else finds them repellant and contemptible. We’ve stumbled ass backwards (cock forwards?) into a rich vein of solidarity, and that’s doing a lot to keep us fixed on the silver linings.
VI. (CW) The thing that warms you chokes you.
That’s where I ended this post when I wrote it the second time. Hey, a fucked up thing happened, but it’s okay because we have the power of friendship or something. And looking back, I’m not sure that anything has strictly happened between then and now to radically alter the sentiment. If we were arguing a court case here, that’d be about where the relevant mishaps stopped. But that’s not how it felt. The silver linings faded, the antagonism remained, and in the absence of resolution I was left furious and adrift.
Fury with nowhere to go is a fire in a closed room. When it burns out, there’s only smoke and darkness. All I could do was choke on it, while on the other side of my screen everyone else seemed to be going through their own version of the same basic dehumanizing process. Social media became nothing but [State] Bans Trans Athletes and Please Help Me Pay Rent and Let’s Kill This Annoying Stranger and Shut Up About Affordability It’s Just Vibes, one on top of another on top of another, everyone arguing about anything arguable, fighting for their lives in the superstructure while accomplishing nothing in the base, “AI” slop and misinformation, Democrats defending the genocide of Palestinians, Iran War Is Almost Over Now We Prommie, on and on and on and on, and when there is a good thing it’s good for exactly as long as it takes the feed to refresh and then it’s gone forever, maybe it never even happened, but the bad things all stay, they just keep coming and they stay and they stack up on top of each other, and it never ends, every single aspect of our existence is something we have to fight for, EVERYTHING is a fight and we’re always losing, we’ve always been losing, we were always going to lose, I try to watch movies and the whole time I’m just thinking It’s Over, I try to play video games and the whole time I’m just thinking It’s Over, so I slam my piano and smoke way too much weed and try not to think about it, which makes me think about it more, again and again and again, nightmares and stomach cramps and fevers and vomiting, sobbing into Zoe’s arms in the middle of the day asking Why, Why, Why, knowing there’s no answer, or knowing that there IS an answer and it’s that we just don’t matter and never did and never will.
Middle of July, I went camping. This wasn’t a planned thing, I just had some friends who happened to be going to a queer-exclusive campground for the weekend and asked if I wanted to come along. I used to go camping with my dad a lot as a kid and I’ve missed it terribly, but given that my health had been Bad I was convinced I wouldn’t be able to do it. It wasn’t until they mentioned that there’s no cell reception that I said yes. Then my partner got sick and tested positive for Covid (in a rare cosmic W that turned out to be a false positive), and instead of recording the “pilot” for this new video series I spent that week taking care of her and trying very very hard not to get sick. I haven’t mentioned it at all but sickness has been a constant companion this year, particularly for my immunocompromised partner. A lot of our friends have been traveling recently, and we got a bit too cavalier about airborne disease prevention and so wound up catching a multitude of cruds, with the added bonus of sometimes having to care for/attend to those very same friends during their sickness. It’s been a year of countless tiny interruptions, or perhaps they might be better described as Straws To Break One’s Back. For two burntout autistic trans women fighting every day just to feel like we’re even allowed to exist in this world, even the smallest disruption could leave us devastated.
But I did it, by god. I went camping. For two glorious days I was completely without internet access, forced to enjoy cold mountain water swimming and tall trees and smoking a complete entire joint by myself while laying in a hammock. I’m not gonna get all new agey on you and yap about it being some big spiritual whatever and actually the solution to alienation and ennui is Get Back To Nature type shit. It was a break. I had a break. It was nice. It’s really not much more complicated than that.
Then I got home, checked my phone, and immediately felt my blood pressure rise. The fury came right back as if it never left, and soon enough I was choking on it all over again. Only this time, with that little bit of distance, I could very plainly see how pointless the whole exercise had become and how bad it was for me. Shocking revelation: I post too much. Who could’ve seen that coming? I have this realization every couple years or so, I know it’s bad for me but I still have this sick compulsion because it’s easy and it feels good (the way punching a hole in drywall feels good) and it costs nothing. I imagine we’ve all been around this carousel many times, our addiction ebbing and flowing as we intellectualize a societal sickness. Everyone wants to stop using it. Everyone stops using it for a while. Everyone ends up coming back anyway.
Actually, no. Maybe it’s true that this is an everyone problem, but I’m not talking about everyone. I’m talking about me. I want to stop using it. I keep coming back anyway. “We” have a bad habit of hiding behind monoliths of mass-behavioral dysfunction, abdicating “our” agency in favor of a comforting collective truth. Addictive social media, parasocial relationships, power dynamics, problematic behaviors, perverse incentive, depression, recession, pandemic, trauma, abuse, AuDHD. These are very real phenomena that deserve our thoughtful care and attention, but like any sociological construct or narrative they can be twisted and corrupted to enable the very behaviors they were meant to question. Which is really nothing new, to be clear. I won’t say that “everyone” does this, but I certainly do it, and I think people in general have been doing it for as long as there have been ideas complex enough to be misunderstood. It just happens to be the case that, even accounting for the many material factors outside my control that have stacked the deck against me, I alone am responsible for what I do with my time. And my time on social media, if I’m really being honest with myself, has become an exercise in self-harm.
Okay, great. It’s the second half of July and I’m finally starting to get the picture. Post less, work on my own shit more. And they say rocket science is complicated. Take those lessons from before the art show and apply them to the next thing. I re-enable LeechBlock so I can only spend fifteen minutes on my vices every three hours. It doesn’t help. The anger is still with me. I go on a walk somewhere I’ve never been to take pictures, and instead of being in the moment I’m just standing there replaying some heinous shit management said to me and gritting my teeth so hard my jaw hurts. Righteous, indignant fury would lights me up completely at random, and I’ll just burn there, alone in a windowless room of my own creation, forgetting that I’m trying to get out of this place. No, be positive. Keep your chin up. You’re good at what you do, you’ve got a solid plan for the immediate future, just lock in and don’t get distracted.
We get word that management is talking shit behind our backs. They’ve dissolved a tenant committee we were part of (something they don’t have authority to do, but hey, rules only apply to the people who don’t enforce them) and keep being surprised that more people here aren’t rallying against us. The elevator breaks down again. Did I mention that our elevator has been out for over 100 days this year? And that we live near the top of our building? They mock us for complaining. They try to incentivize stair use by giving out gift cards, and when we explain how insanely ableist that is they send out an email saying they’ve stopped giving out gift cards because “some people felt left out.” When we advocate for residents in wheelchairs, they deflect by insisting that WE should be fine taking the stairs because “obviously you’re not disabled.” Ha ha, ha ha.
Little things. Tiny indignities. Every day erasing the ‘TRANS RIGHTS’ I put on the community whiteboard without touching anything else, leaving threatening notices and sending accusatory emails about shit that isn’t our responsibility. Cluelessly misgendering my partner while introducing her to a new resident. A roll of the eye here, a dramatic sigh there. Shit that if you talked about it in isolation people would go “well that doesn’t sound so bad,” and it wouldn’t be if it wasn’t everything all the time every single day. That’s microaggressions, baby!!!
The entire month has been one long, slow, rolling panic attack. It abated briefly after my camping trip, but two days of peace can only outweigh so much. And meanwhile in the background this whole time, there was a clock ticking-- a meeting we set with someone who works for the city three months ago to talk about some of the problems I’ve shared with you. When we set up this meeting, we had a radically different set of goals and were approaching it with a lot less urgency. Then stuff happened, then more stuff happened, and it kept happening to just about the most absurd possible extension of happening-ness outside of a specious and easily-contested eviction notice (been there done that). So our agenda got a lot more specific and action-oriented, and we’ve spent most of the last week preparing. We had a good feeling about it, but good feelings are wrong all the time. This was THE make or break moment for us in terms of what our options are going forward, which only underlined how awful it felt to be in this position. And in the meantime: everything. I go on a grocery run and everything is more expensive. I give ten dollars to an unhoused woman and she sobs because I’m the first person to stop in hours, and she’s hoping God sent me to help her keep the landlord from changing the locks in her house. He didn’t, and I can’t.
My bus gets stuck in traffic, and I watch as a sheet-covered body is wheeled into the back of an ambulance. I see a news story about the brutal murders of asylum seekers forcefully deported by our despotic regime, and when they describe the scene of their fourteen month old child crying next to their corpses I am suddenly 19 again and looking down at my mother’s casket, thinking how the makeup they put on her was wrong, and then I’m 26 and my uncle just called to tell me that he found my dad slumped over in his trailer a couple days ago, dead, and that there’s no money for a funeral or wake or anything and I can’t afford to go up to Ohio anyway, so he ships me all my dad’s worldly possessions in three medium sized boxes, including the man’s ashes. And then I’m awash in shame for thinking that my pain, my grief, is even remotely comparable to the horrors being inflicted on countless others less fortunate than me. They weren’t shot. They weren’t tortured. It was heart disease. Everyone who doesn’t die of murder dies of heart disease. Suck it up, kid. Could be worse. I get home and there’s a notice on our door, rent’s going up another hundred bucks next year and at this rate we’ll be priced out by 2028 at the latest, and now I’m thinking about every property this company manages, and all the properties managed by companies just like it, the casual misery they inflict on renters, the infantalization and presumed guilt, the administrative burden, the junk fees, the harassment, the dehumanization. Fury howling away in my chest, cracked wood whistling in the heat of a fire with nowhere to go, nothing to do but burn. I swear to god if this meeting goes poorly, if they show up and hear what we have to say and just shrug us off or worse, I don’t know what I’m going to do.
I think, this is just what life is. It’s watching beautiful things die young in the crooked jaws of rabid predators. It’s fighting for your life in a fixed match. It’s building a log cabin in a forest fire. It’s peace to lull you into a false sense of security to maximize the pain of its disruption. It’s bad things happening to people you love and good things happening to people you hate. It’s the act of waking up every day and pretending that you don’t want to kill yourself even though you really, really do. It’s a fire that warms you as it chokes you, strangulation misinterpreted as a tender caress, an abuser you have no choice but to love.
Then the day comes. Put the fucking breakdown on ice, it’s time to lock in. Clean the apartment, rehearse the spiel, check my partner’s notes. No more waiting. The moment is here.
VII. THE MEETING.
It was an unambiguous success. After so many weeks of management reacting with innocent bafflement that we didn’t want to cosign their censorious bullshit, treating us like idiot children who just don’t understand how the world works, it was cathartic beyond words to have a city employee react with obvious and un-exaggerated horror to our predicament. Over the course of our conversation, without me even really noticing, everything changed. Maybe not materially, objectively, but in me. In my heart.
I wish I could be more specific, but for now it’s safer to keep it vague. The bottom line is that I have been knocked back into reality and reminded how outdated and irrelevant management’s worldview really is. Yes, it is of a piece with an ascendant ideology of burger king fascism that is doing untold damage across the country and all over the world. But my building’s management aren’t Trump, and Seattle isn’t The United States. There is a powerful, popular, and growing movement here fighting for the rights of renters like me. A war is being waged for the future of this city, for all the people who don’t live here yet but that, like I did in 2020, may someday feel they have nowhere else to go. I’ve met the people leading that fight. I’ve seen other communities in the same situation as us. I don’t want to pull the ladder up behind me. For all my frustrations with our living situation, I love where I am and I never want to leave. I’ve already lived here longer than I’ve been in any one place since I was a child. Everyone deserves the stability this place (at first) granted us, and such stable places deserve to be protected from predatory managerial practices in the long term after all the ribbons have been cut (to steal a phrase from my partner). And of course, artists deserve the right to express themselves in public, even and especially when that expression crosses the bounds of respectability. I can’t fight Trump, I can’t fight the small business tyrants, I can’t fight the cops or AIPAC or anything like that. But I can challenge my fucking landlords.
I’ve been thinking a lot about something Ben Collins said in an interview on Worst Of All Possible Worlds, about The Onion’s acquisition of InfoWars and why he refuses to back down despite all the legal hurdles thrown up by Alex Jones. To paraphrase, he said it’s easy to get bogged down in the rampant injustice surrounding us all day every day, to feel totally helpless and doomed. But with InfoWars, he couldn’t stand to just let Jones win, and he knew that if he didn’t pick that fight, no one else would. He says it’s not about fighting every fight in every war that crosses your dash. It’s about picking the one fight you know you have a chance at, even if it’s a slim one, and refusing to give up until you win or die.
So that’s where I’m writing this post from: ringside, after hours, getting ready for the big one. There’s a lot I don’t know, a lot that could go wrong, and almost certainly within the week there’ll have been some fresh indignity to knock me back down a peg. But I intend to cling to this hope with the discipline of a monk. My fury burns just as bright and hot as ever, but there’s a window in that room now I think. A small one, sure, but it’s there, and as long as I don’t give up, keep fighting, keep making connections, keep practicing my art, it will only get bigger. Ironically enough, as I write this metaphor about how I’m not choking in the smog of Posting anymore, the actual literal wildfire smoke choking Seattle this week is finally starting to clear away. I know it’ll be back eventually, whether it’s this fire or the next, but that’s not my fight is it? I will live and breathe and exist when the air is clean, and when it’s hazardous I will batten down the hatches and make sure my friends are taken care of. Day turns to night, summer to autumn, and the world revolves just as it ever has. No matter how bleak things feel, time marches on.
There will be no End. There will be no Apocalypse. It’s luxurious to imagine kicking back to watch it all burn, or being wiped out in nuclear armaggedon, but that day won’t come. Always tomorrow. Always the next fight. Always the next love. Every monstrous tyrant who ever lived has died. Every evil empire has eventually sometime fallen. Our enemies like to paint a picture of permanence, insisting that their worldview is as natural as gravity, but it’s a lie. Nothing is permanent. Nothing is natural. Appealing to an unquestionable immaterial authority is the strategy of someone who cannot justify their beliefs in words. You can’t argue with them because they don’t really know anything. That used to depress me, but now it’s freeing. This is not an intellectual fight. This is a matter of material conditions and human beings in the real world, and we don’t need to humor the unhinged fantasies of our enemies in order to fight them and win.
I’m tired of fighting, but maybe that’s because all along I’ve been thinking of every fight as the same fight. There’s a sense in which that’s true, but in practical terms it is not. Because what’s really going on here, the reason I’m sharing all of this with you, the actual revelation at the core of where I’m at as a person and an artist and a participant in civic society in this moment, is that this interminable crisis CAN be adapted to. To illustrate what I mean, please indulge me in one last psychodramatic episode.
VIII. (CW) Why I’m Quitting Video Essays.
To finally put this post to bed, I’d like to circle back around to the Video Essay of it all. To repeat myself, yes, I am quitting video essays. But I quit video essays knowing that I’m not strictly speaking done with them. Two in particular, Everyone is Wrong About LOST and Why Aren’t We Talking About Sinkdog?, would kill me to leave unfinished. It’s just that I can’t be A Video Essayist anymore. As A Video Essayist, I feel guilty every time I post something unscripted. Yes yes, everybody does it, no one cares, I know. But I care. I didn’t want to be a vlogger, a debate gal, a content creator-- I wanted to be A Video Essayist. Scripted videos with snappy editing, good lighting, thoughtful arguments, funny jokes, and unapologetic politics. That is what I Do. That is what I am being Paid for. Every video I do that isn’t that is extracurricular activity.
Most of the videos I’ve done post-pandemic are unscripted. The scripted ones took forever and performed poorly. I had a good run a couple years ago talking about prestige TV building up to the aforemented unreleased LOST video, but that was cut off at the head by the opening salvos of what would become lately’s Events and Circumstances. And even then, scripted or unscripted, almost every video I released felt to me like an apology. Something to tide you over until the main course. I’ve always been making up for lost time, “building momentum,” “getting my feet back under me.” It’s proof of life. It’s saying Hey, sorry the Big One I’ve been teasing for a decade still isn’t finished, I promise I am Still Making Videos, just please whatever you do don’t unsubscribe or stop giving me money.
I remember during the premiere of, I think it was the Knives Out video, someone I recognized from comments on my older stuff posted in the chat “OMG Sarah’s back!” and it made me so unreasonably happy. Yes, I was Back. I wanted to be Back. I fell off for a minute because of the pandemic and moving to the other side of the country by myself, but I am Back and I am Making Videos Again, it’ll be just like it was after the McElroy Brothers video and I can pick up and move forward like nothing happened. Except it did happen. And it kept happening, louder, angrier, scarier, worse. And then it stopped. So I threw something together to proclaim I Am Back, and it was good, and not as many people watched it as I would’ve liked, but it was a good video, and I think this time I can really keep up my pace. And then it started happening again, faster, sharper, meaner, Worse. So I threw something unscripted together to proclaim I’m Not Quite Back Yet But I Will Be Soon, and it was good, and not as many people watched it as I would’ve liked, but it was a good video, and you know what I bet I could do a couple more just like it to maintain a presence until shit stops happening and I actually have the mental energy to do what I should be doing. Only it doesn’t stop happening. It ebbs and flows, it isn’t constant, but it never goes away either. I think it can’t get worse, and then it gets worse. I get evicted. My grandad dies. My cat dies. My mental health clinic closes. I start a collaboration with someone and their computer dies (twice). I join a podcast collective and the founders steal charity money. I get paid to work on a Homestuck game and become just one more victim of a prolific stalker. I join a vibrant creative queer community, it is harassed out of existence. I join a vibrant creative queer community, it implodes over personal drama. I join a vibrant creative queer community, it withers away because no one has time or energy to be vibrant creative and queer anymore. Now even the unscripted videos feel like a burden, an obligation, a shameful admission of defeat, the rock bottom bare minimum that is still somehow too much to ask of me.
What’s going on here is beyond “not fun anymore.” This isn’t a problem of process, workflow, motivation, or creative reinvention. I’m just not A Video Essayist. I could talk plenty about how the deck is stacked against me and anyone else in a similar position, how the standard model of video essays is labor-intensive and we should have municipal video hosting and arts grants for channels to hire some help, but all of that is secondary to the fact that I’m Not a video essayist. I remember playing poker a couple years ago with some mid-20s zoomers, I responded to the dreaded “what do you do” with an anguished shrug and a handful of canned responses that felt entirely performative. The asker then said “so why do you do it?” and I didn’t have an answer. It’s complicated. I’m demoralized right now but things are looking up. It’ll get better. I do it because I love it, it’s just hard to love right now. But inside I’m thinking: Because it’s my job. Because a bunch of strangers give me hundreds of dollars a month to make video essays, and I’ve been bleeding supporters for years but I’m afraid if I rock the boat I’ll lose everything I have left. Because I don’t know what else to do. Because there’s nothing else I can do. The question made me angry and I’ve been stewing on it ever since. I always thought the anger was because damn it these youngsters just don’t get what it’s like to be in the second half of your thirties and having to do a thing you don’t really want to do because it’s just what you’ve wound up with. But I’m only now realizing that while yes that’s generally true, the reason I was mad in that situation was because they knew and I knew that everything I said was bullshit. That I was wasting my time, my life, my expressive capacity on a medium that stopped exciting me two presidencies ago. In that moment, I felt like a poser. Because I was.
It’s not the art, the job, the people, the platform. It’s me. It’s my relationship with the thing that is broken. I’ve been pathetically chasing the thrill of “OMG Sarah’s back” all this time and was too committed to the bit to realize I was just going in circles. I can’t afford to pretend anymore that the static crisis has an end in sight. There’s no corner to turn where I’m suddenly back at full creative-analytic capacity. Shit’s going to keep happening. Tragedies will unfurl out of tragedies. And all the while, I have to keep living. I have to keep my heart open. I refuse to languish the rest of my life away, toiling under the cosmic cruelty of the systems that govern us in the throes of a depressive spiral. If I’m going to survive in the crisis, endure through tomorrow’s setbacks, I have to stop behaving as though I can manifest 2014 back into reality through sheer force of will.
People keep asking me if I’m back, and I haven’t really had an answer. But now I’m thinking, no, I’m not back. Maybe I’ll never be back. Maybe I don’t want to be back. Maybe “back” is the problem.
It’s 2026, sweetheart. Fucking act like it.
IX. A Conclusion, not The End.
Congratulations, you’ve just read 10,000 words of me looking into a mirror and describing what I see. Now what?
The new series will be coming to you soon. The 2025 Ghostwatch vlogs will probably come out in September. As for stuff like ten dollar name reads, behind the scenes material etc... I don’t know. For now, I’m not making any changes there and will continue reading names as usual. There are a lot of big questions still to be answered, and for once I’m not embarking on this journey with the delusion that I have all the answers. The main thing is that I am not pursuing the hallmarks of The Video Essay. These will be casual, unscripted videos where I talk about a movie I’ve just watched. Nothing ground-breaking, nothing stylish. I’m not trying to make art here. It will be a critical exercise, the rhetorical equivalent of a morning yoga routine. It’s practice, essentially. I’m aiming for a per-episode runtime of about 20-30 minutes, and a consistent, reliable release schedule (exact interval TBD). They will not be video essays. They will be structured vlogs. You’ll learn more about the rules of that structure in the near future.
Suffice it to say, I understand if after all this you feel like you don’t want to give me money anymore. I’d ask you to stick around at least as long as it takes for you to get a sense of the new thing first, but it’s your choice. Whatever you do, thanks for the support anyway. No judgment on my part.
In the meantime, I want to leave you with some of the fruits of my artsy-fartsy 2026. You know, something to tide you over until the next thing, ha ha ha. Please find in this gdrive folder some of my art show-featured photography and collage, and an improvised piano collaboration between me and a thunder storm that rolled through Seattle a while back. I don’t intend to make a habit of sharing these things on here, especially my piano recordings, but in this very specific case I want to share them. Not as an apology. Not as a desperate plea to keep you satisfied. I am just proud of this art and I want to share it with you, simple as. Let me know what you think by whatever venue feels most appropriate.
And that’s it. Thanks for reading, everyone. Let’s all agree to take care of ourselves together from now on.
Until next time.